Board Game; 3-5 Players; Ages 10+ by Rio GrandeThe players take on the roles of the heads of influential families in Paris at the end of the 14th century. In the shadow of the Notre Dame cathedral, the players compete for prosperity and reputation. Each family controls one of the 3 -5 boroughs that surround the site of Notre Dame. As head of his family, each player tries, through clever use of his action cards, to advance the power and prestige of his family, but penalties are assessed those who do not take care of the health of the people who live in their borough. The player with the most prestige at the end is the winner.

The story of the Alea big box series is a little like the biblical one of the fat and thin kine: a number of years of plenty followed by the same number of famine. In the first four years the label produced seven games, all worth a place on your shelf; in the next four there were just three, and while it would be wrong to describe any of them as bad, they certainly weren't essential purchases. It is a pleasure, therefore, to be able to report that number 11 sees something of a return to form.

Notre Dame is another game which sees blocks and money - both of which are inevitably in short supply - being converted into victory points. Each player has an identical board, and a neat piece of geometry means that, no matter how many people are playing, these fit snugly round a central piece like the petals of a flower. The central piece shows the eponymous cathedral.

The personal boards are split into eight areas. Seven of these are locations and when activated do good things; the eighth is a scale on which you keep track of your rat problem. Each player also has a set of nine cards and a collection of blocks which, rather like those in El Grande, are split into a personal and a general supply. Seven of the cards correspond to the locations on your board, an eighth to Notre Dame, while the ninth controls the ``confidant'', a special piece that acts as a bonus block in a location of your choice.

There are three sets of three rounds and at the start of each set you shuffle your nine cards and place them in a face-down deck in front of you. The start of each round sees you drawing three of them. You then choose one of the three to keep and pass the other two to the player on your left. That player keeps one of the two and passes on the third. Everyone is doing this and so at the end of the process you will again be holding three cards, one from your own deck and two from players to your right. During the round you will play two of the three.

Playing a card nearly always involves placing a block from your personal supply into the area pictured on the card. This activates the area, giving you a benefit. If you don't have a cube in your stock, you can still activate the area by moving in one from another area. In the unlikely event of your not being able to do the first and being unwilling to do the second, the card is simply discarded and you get nothing.

The benefits are all either to do with gaining cubes, coins and prestige (= victory) points or keeping the rats under control. For example, the Monastery School enables you to move cubes from the general supply to your personal one. The number you move is equal to the number you have in the area. The Bank, which gives you coins, and your Mansion, which gives you prestige points, work in the same way: the bigger the investment you have built up in the area, the bigger the pay-off when you activate it. This general pattern of ``more investment = more benefit'' is also followed with the other areas, though not always in quite such a straightforward fashion. This makes cube management important: you need to get as many as you can on to your board and that can only be achieved if you have enough in your personal supply.

The next thing you need to ensure you have enough of is money, which has two uses. At the start of each round, three ``character cards'' are turned over, each offering some sort of desirable benefit - prestige points being the most common. Once the action cards have been played, you get to ``bribe'' one of these characters. This costs you a coin and gives you the benefit the chosen character is offering. The other thing you need money for is to keep well in with the Church. When you play a Notre Dame card, you pay 1, 2 or 3 coins and in return get 1, 3 or 6 prestige points. The payment also entitles you to place a block on the Notre Dame tile, an act which will give you a share of the further prestige points the Church hands out at the end of each set of three rounds.

This brings us to the rats. Each of the three character cards that were turned over carries between 0 and 3 rat symbols. The sum of these numbers is the increase in the rat population for the round, and each player must record it on their personal ``rat meter''. The scale on these runs from 0 to 9, and if you go off the top of it, it costs you 2 prestige points and a cube from somewhere on your board. This is not a crippling penalty, but it is a significant setback and you want to avoid it if you can, especially early on, when the loss of the cube has a knock-on effect that lasts for the rest of the game. Preventing yourself from going past the 9-barrier is a matter of activating the right areas on your board during the actions phase. Several of the areas include as part of their benefits a ``move rat marker back 1'' section. This helps, but the key if you want to keep the rodents under control is to invest in the Hospital, as the number of blocks you have there is subtracted from the ``official'' increase to get your personal one.

One more subsystem needs to be described and that concerns the coach. Your district contains 5 markets and a set of linking roads. At the start of the game your coach sits in the central market and each of the other four contains a message token in your colour. These messages are worth between 1 and 4 prestige points to whoever picks them up. The less valuable in terms of points also carry an extra reward such as a coin or a block. To move your coach you need to activate the Coachhouse, which you do in the usual way by playing the appropriate card and placing a block. Collecting the messages would be fairly mundane if all that happened was that each player did a circuit of their own district, but a clever rule prevents this by requiring your collection to be as evenly spread across the colours as possible. This forces you to make longer journeys into other players' districts, making the question of how far you can move your coach in a single activation a matter of importance, and as you can probably guess, this depends on how many blocks you have in the area.

As you can see from all this, Notre Dame belongs to the category of games where players are presented with a situation where they lack the time and the resources to do all the things they would like to do, and where strategy is less a matter of combating other players' plans than making a set of decisions that adds up to a coherent one that works for you. Such games tend to appeal to those who like a good degree of control over what happens to them, and this is where the game might prove unpopular with some because of the way the cards which determine what you can do arrive in your hand. It can certainly be frustrating when the three cards you draw from your deck contain two that you definitely want to use and you have to let one of them go, but this is something I personally can live with. It just means that I have hard decisions to make and need to keep my plans flexible. And as a counterbalance to the initial frustration, there is always the possibility of windfalls arriving from your right. It's a rare round when you don't have a good use for either of the cards arriving on the merry-go-round, and this is especially true if you are paying attention to what is going on to your right and making deductions about which cards these two players don't seem to have at the top of their lists.

Notre Dame is not for you if you demand lots of interaction, because it has very little. You are also likely to find it unsatisfactory if you are the sort who likes to make firm plans several turns ahead, because the card draw will frustrate you. However, if you're in neither of those categories, I recommend you give it a try. It has interesting new ideas, is strategically rich and, as always with Alea, is impeccably presented. I like it and see it as another of the highlights of what is turning out so far to be a pretty good year.